Homosexuality among women in this country is no doubt on the increase; as it certainly is in England and continental Europe. In France it has always been endemic; but up to recent years, so far as I am aware, there have been few cases in English society, or indeed outside the regular houses of prostitution, where it is always to be found. In America, there are many influences at work to promote and foster its development. The domestic emancipation of women, the movement in favor of equal social and political rights, the consequent decadence of legitimate marriage, and the fear of begetting children, while they have without any question augmented the ratio in criminality, and feminine insanity,—always grouped with homosexuality among the sex,—it seems only a corollary that the latter vice should show a proportionate increase.

Co-education in medicine, and other sciences, while opening new avenues of knowledge to women, has retarded marriage, taught independence, and reduced the former healthy intercourse of the sexes to trivial and passing flirtations. But, notwithstanding all this, as the great law of sexuality is too firmly ingrained to be overcome by Darwin's almost equally potent one—that all organs deteriorate and finally disappear from disuse—it is a safe assumption that the evolution in America of a race of men without penises, and women without corresponding organs, is not a peril of the immediate future.